needing more time

remember years ago when we would create, all the time, when we were just always making things and reading and reading and reading and reading?  remember when i made art about reading?  remember when i painted and read about painting and planned performance art pieces and read about performance?

when i was studying visual art over a decade ago, our professors encouraged us to read constantly about art, to make it our lives.  and we took that to heart.  my sister, my friend tony, and i always toted a copy of artforum or art in america everywhere we went on top of the other books we were reading.  on top of the sketchbooks we carried everywhere with us.

i have dozens of sketchbooks and journals filled with drawings and journal entries and magazine cuttings and stickers and pictures and photographs and scraps of all sorts, bits of design and art and color and inspiration for later.

for a long time i thought that my life would be just like that: i would read and browse and collect and consider then create these art projects, create these performances and paintings and attempt to explain visually certain ideas that percolated up in my brain.

i have just finished reading allison bechdel's most recent comic memoir are you my mother?  bechdel writes about her relationship with her mother, her relationship with her therapist, her relationships in general, and ties it all together with her research into psychotherapy, particularly childhood development, development of the 'i' and attachment theories as developed by donald winnicott.

i found striking her descriptions of this psychotherapeutic investigation, the references to influences like virginia woolf, her considerations of her mother's interest in sylvia plath.  it made me realize that i do not read as much as i used to, that i do not research as much, and that i wish i had the time for more of my own research, my own development of ideas.

bechdel's mom helped pay for her life after college when she lived in new york, trying to make it as an artist and writer.  now allison bechdel is an artist/writer, has time for herself and her own project.  indeed, her research, her projects are her livelihood.

you know i read a lot.  i'm a reader.  but i don't have the time or energy or patience right now for deep research.  i do not have direction.  and though it seems like i should be doing this, like i should be making something, as i have always been involved in projects for so long, i don't know what i would make.

in thinking about what sort of project i would put together now, i wonder what fascinates me, what sorts of ideas interest me now?  and i worry i do not have enough interest in anything particular anymore.  not like i did.

i need to figure this out.